Perhaps not as well-known and prolific as his famous student and contemporary Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), Xavier Mellery is considered a pivotal pioneer of Belgian Symbolism. With a finite number of works - mostly kept in public collections in Belgium - Mellery's creative legacy and influence is anything but inconsequential. Considered one of the founders of the art movement in Belgium, who made a prodigious contribution to its early development in the 1880s, Mellery did not receive the international recognition he deserves. Both his paintings and drawings are distinguished by their monumentality, in spite of their relatively small size, and loaded with a deep allegorical content, yet they seem to proclaim scenes from daily life. It is this contrast in contradictions that is still as mysterious and alluring today.

Born on August 9, 1845 as the son of a gardener at the Royal Palace of Laeken, near Brussels, the young artist was first apprenticed to the decorative painter Charles Albert (1821-1889). His training continued at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1860. In 1870, Mellery won the prestigious Prix de Rome, travelling to Italy via Germany. Upon his return to Brussels four years later, Mellery rented a studio from Félix Mommen (1827-1914), patron and dealer in artists' supplies. This curious combination of ateliers, exhibition space, factory, and shop, known as Ateliers Mommen, provided a lively artistic exchange and the place where Khnopff became Mellery's apprentice in 1875. Rooted in academic tradition, Mellery developed a symbolist art based on realism and regularly exhibited at the salons of the artists associations Lex XX (Les Vingt), La Libre Esthétique, Salon de la Rose+Croix and Pour L'Art.

Starting around 1885, Mellery expresses his search for the deepest meaning of things in intimist drawings. Interiors of a chapel or the artist’s home or even an exterior: the encompassing subject matter progresses towards loneliness and silence. Living beings and their surroundings blend in, the intimate character of the scenery enhanced by the lack of use of color. Mellery aptly named these exertions Emotions d’Art: L’Âme des Choses (artistic emotions: the soul of things). Through the portrayal of artifacts, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance, the intimate meaning of the spectacle of life is revealed. With her inward gaze, alluding dreams and secrets, the knitter's familiar home is a zone of transition to a reality residing behind the visible, behind the appearance of things.